The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry

The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report, The Guardian, by Dana Nuccitelli Monday 16 September Climate contrarians appear to be running damage control in the media before the next IPCC report is published The fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is due out on September 27th, and is expected to reaffirm with growing confidence that humans are driving global warming and climate change. In anticipation of the widespread news coverage of this esteemed report, climate contrarians appear to be in damage control mode, trying to build up skeptical spin in media climate stories. Just in the past week we’ve seen:

Stage 2: Deny We’re the CauseOnce people move beyond denying that the problem exists, they often move to the next stage, denying that we’re responsible. John Christy and Roy Spencer took this approach by disputing the accuracy of global climate models in The Daily Mail and The Christian Post,……, climate models have done very well in projecting long-term global surface temperature changes………

Stage 3: Deny It’s a Problem

Once they’ve progressed through the first two stages and admitted global warming is happening and human-caused, contrarians generally move on to Stage 3, denying it’s a problem. ……..

Stage 4: Deny We can Solve It

In his editorial, Roy Spencer bounced between the second and fourth stages of global warming denial, also claiming that solving the problem is too expensive and will hurt the poor. In reality the opposite is true……….

Stage 5: It’s too Late

Stage 5 global warming denial involves arguing that it’s too late to solve the problem, so we shouldn’t bother trying (though few climate contrarians have reached this level). Unfortunately this stage can be self-fulfilling. If we wait too long to address the problem, we may end up committing ourselves to catastrophic climate change.